American politics

Joe Lieberman on Fort Hood

I INTERVIEWED Joe Lieberman yesterday—this week's column will be a profile of the heretical senator from Connecticut.

He said much more than I can squeeze into a page of The Economist. Among the parts I've had to cut was our conversation about the Fort Hood massacre, which his Senate committee is investigating.

America needs Arabic-speaking and Muslim soldiers. But it also needs to screen out people like Nidal Hasan, who is accused of murdering 13 people on a military base earlier this month. How, I asked, can we strike a balance?

Senator Lieberman responded by telling me about a recent conversation he had had with a senior officer. The officer told him that people in the military need to able not merely to trust their comrades-in-arms, but to trust them blindly. On the battlefield, you cannot afford even a split second of worrying whether the guy next to you is really on your side.

Which is why, he said, it is essential to take note of people who say and do the kinds of things that Major Hasan did. (He was in email contact with a well-known extremist imam, and gave a lecture that seemed to condone jihadism.)

If the non-Muslims in the military know that the army effectively monitors and screens out such people, they will be able to trust the Muslims they serve alongside. And the Muslims in the military will know that they are trusted, he said.

This all makes sense to me, but it doesn't resolve the central conundrum, which is: where do you draw the line? With hindsight, it is clear that someone should have acted on the suspicions people had about Maj Hasan.

But terrorist incidents like this are so rare in the US that it is going to be very hard to devise a test to detect likely perpetrators. Any test that catches the bad guys is likely also to yield thousands of false positives. At least, that's my guess. It will be interesting to see what Senator Lieberman's committee recommends.

Lieberman cares a lot more about Israel than America. Everything he says and does is carefully designed to be middle of the road so that he can influence policy no matter who is in power. The rest of the time he does all he can to escalate the fears of terrorism and support Israel in the middle east. Time to get rid of this two faced traitor.

Frankly, I think he was more of a "loser" type like the Columbine and Virginia Tech kids (which surely appear among all ethnic groups). Guys who do these things usually have some kind of self-justification. Sometimes it's drawn from an identifiable creed or ideology (and then warped), and sometimes its so ideosynchratic that we just call him a "nut." We need to stop fixating on the "justification" that they cite - it's irrelevant - and try to identify which of the disaffected among us might go over the cliff.

I look forward to the committee's recommendation that future unhinged gunmen be identified prior to any assault. And maybe they can throw in some sanction of religious discrimination for the courts to rightly overturn for justice's sake. I take a tribal offense at the term "heretical" standing in for "obtuse."

What exactly was meant by the comment that non-Muslims will feel more comfortable when "such people" are monitored? That all Muslims in the army be monitored? And why stop with Muslims? There's a long history of black and southern white resentment towards the United States government as well. Perhaps "such people" should be monitored as well.